Psychological complex

“ Be this as it may, the psychological consequences remain the same, namely, the psyche never rids itself of the complex. With the desolation of the complex an improvement takes place, but this is also accompanied by a destruction of a more or less greater portion of the personality, so that the precocious dement at best escapes with a psychic mutilation. The separation of the precocious dement from reality, the loss of interest in objective happenings, is not difficult to explain when we consider that he persistently stands under the ban of an invincible complex. ”

“ But, more important than this, in certain abnormal conditions where the dissociation between systems of complexes becomes more exaggerated, mood, subject, chronological and other complexes, linked as each is with its own characteristic emotions and feelings—instincts and other innate dispositions—play a paramount part and dominate the personality. In the hysterical personality, in particular, there is more or less complete reversion to or a subconscious awakening of one or other such complex. ”

“ The practical application of the theory to emotional outbreaks of everyday life.—The significance of these principles for our purpose lies in the fact that they enable us to understand numerous psychological events of everyday and pathological life that otherwise would be unintelligible. It is worth while then to study a little more closely the practical application in everyday life of this principle of settings before applying it to the more difficult problem of imperative ideas or obsessions. ”

“ Since the function of reason is thus restricted, and its competency to supply an end for, or principle of, action is denied, we must seek this end either in the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany both sensory and motor presentations,—perceptions, that is to say, and actions,—or in the more complex, or apparently more complex, emotions of the mind. ”

“ But this, as yet, only within the narrow area of the highest culture." The earlier and more fundamental psychological factor of humanity is feeling and not thought, or more accurately an incipient rationality, thoroughly suffused with emotional motives; and primitive analogies proceed by a feeling of analogical fitness, and not by an intellectual justification. ”

“ For our conscious volition implies that we know what we will. In consequence of these obvious considerations, a more modern psychology has been led to its well-known doctrine that all such psychological divisions are rather distinctions between different aspects of the same process, than means for telling us of naturally sundered or even of separable processes. ”

“ But when we go somewhat deeper and consider that in this disease a complex occupies almost all the associations, holding them persistently, that this complex is absolutely unassailable by psychological stimuli, that it is, as it were, split off from all external influences, it would then seem that the before mentioned analogy is of somewhat greater significance. The complex on account of its intensity lays claim to the brain activity in its greatest extent, so that a great number of impulses belonging to other spheres become dissipated. ”

“ I employ this word “tendency” as synonymous with needs, appetites, instincts, inclinations, desires; it is the generic term of which the others are varieties; it has the advantage over them of embracing at the same time both the psychological and physiological aspects of the phenomenon. All the tendencies suppose a motor innervation; they translate the needs of the individual, whatever they may be, physical or mental; the basis, the root of 3the affective life is in them, not in the consciousness of pleasure and pain which accompanies them according as they are satisfied or opposed. ”

“ Even if we believe that emotions are complex facts, involving vague sensations as well as feelings, and that terms like emotion, memory, reasoning and will are names for classes of mental facts rather than for mental powers, it still remains important to distinguish between feeling, intellect and will, as well as to recognize the interdependence of the mental processes. ”

“ As a part of the phenomenon, the lack of sociability or emotional rapport will be well known to you all, this representing a striking disturbance of the function of reality. Through considerable psychological study of these patients we discovered, that this lack of adaptation to reality is compensated by a progressive increase in the creation of phantasies. ”

“ Lastly, it is not without importance that the sentiment is an absolutely necessary and constant feature of the normal mental life. Most of our sentiments come into action daily and influence the behaviour of every moment of the life of every day. The complex, on the other hand, in the sense in which I should like to use the term, has essentially a pathological implication. It is not only a result of suppression, but the product of independent activity of the suppressed content, whether accompanied by alternate consciousness or wholly within the region of the unconscious. ”

“ We ourselves are for ourselves a complex combination of sensations; and yet all our feelings and emotions and volitions are only a part of it. Psychology thus necessarily considers those experiences of feeling and will and character simply as changes in the midst of that central experience of personality which is itself made up of bodily sensations. Each bit of will and emotion must be decomposed into its finest elements. ”

“ There is at present an epidemic of practical or applied psychology. People however will wake up from their psychological dreams and will realize that applied psychology is nothing but a nightmare. I am fully aware of the fact that my present protest will draw on me the ire and severe attacks of many a psychologist, but I sincerely hope that some of the more earnest psychologists will sustain me in my present contention. ”

“ As against the introspectionist, then, the behaviorist is justified in his contention that psychological procedure must be objective and experimental in character.274 The danger to which he has exposed himself is the failure to differentiate his problem from that of physiology and physics. It is only by a proper recognition of both the objective and the distinctive character of conscious behavior that psychology can free itself of the reproach which is heaped upon it by members of its own household and take the place that rightfully belongs to it in the community of the sciences. ”

“ He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others. ”

“ And so I think we confuse our problems when we attempt to explain empirical psychological phenomena in philosophical or ultimate terms. We must treat our psychological elements—ideas, wishes, emotions, etc,—as the chemist treats atoms and molecules. But, just as the latter may take up ultimate problems as a special field of investigation so may we do, if we like, but we must not treat them as psychological problems. ”

“ Amongst other things they tend to determine the points of view, the attitudes of mind, the individual and social conscience, judgment, etc., and, as large systems, may become “sides to one’s character.” When such complexes have strong emotional tones they may set up conflicts leading to the inhibition of antagonistic sentiments, and sometimes to the contraction and even disruption of the personality. All these phenomena can be induced by the artificial creation and organization of complexes and this principle becomes an important one in therapeutics. ”

“ A study of the psychogenesis of a concrete case will on the one hand illustrate these principles and, on the other, the structure and dynamics of normal personality.
Before making such a study, however, we ought to have a working conception of the normal; and this we are entitled, from the point of view of dynamic psychology, to construct on the basis of data supplied by studies of abnormal and normal mental behavior. The older way of considering human personality was to conceive it as an “ego” with various faculties. ”

“ Working speculatively with psychological material there is a risk of being sacrificed to the general misunderstanding which bestows the value of an objective theory upon the line of psychological evolution thus elaborated. ”

“ To accomplish this analysis requires direct psychological study carried to a high pitch of perfection; it being necessary, among other things, to investigate the degree in which mental character is created by circumstances, since no one supposes that cerebral conformation does all, and circumstances nothing. ”

“ This theory limits itself rigidly to empirical facts, and traces back complexes to their antecedents and their elemental factors. It regards the psychological life as being only an effect, a reaction to the environment, and accords the greatest rôle and the largest place to sensation. ”

“ But the psychological method has obvious and inherent limitations. Like any other natural science, psychology is limited to description and causal explanation of the phenomena of its special field, which in this case is states of consciousness. ”

“ On the other hand, the mental processes which are apt to be connected with a "complex" appear only very rarely with indifferent words. It is much more difficult to make a sharp analysis of these symptoms and to enumerate separate processes, because as a rule the complex is felt merely as a general mental and physiological inhibition. ”

“ The prominence of the discussion of unfortunate and misleading tendencies in psychological opinion should not be allowed to obscure the more intrinsically important problems which in the main are of a different, though possibly not of an unrelated character. I should be defeating one of the purposes of these essays if, by the discussion of mooted positions, I conveyed the notion that the problems thus presented were naturally the fundamental ones about which advance in psychology may be most promisingly centred. ”

“ The general psychological problem is to describe the actual psychic events as they occur, to analyze them into their simplest elements, and inasmuch as it is this purely pragmatic application of psychology to the problem of inference that concerns us, we need to deal only with that law which defines the combination of images and with the question,—how the spirit achieves this combination. ”

“ It seems impossible to discuss any psychological principle without finally coming back to the subject of emotions. It truly seems that all roads lead to the instincts and to the emotions which drive them. And so, as we follow the trail of suggestion, we suddenly turn a corner and find ourselves back at our starting-point—the emotional life. Like all other ideas, suggestions get tied up with emotions to form complexes, of which the driving-power is the emotion. ”

“ Nevertheless the longing for these pleasures, under the impulses of this instinct, recurs from time to time. The mind dwells on them, the imagination is excited and weaves a fabric of pictures, sentiments, thoughts, and emotions the whole of which thus becomes organized into a systematized complex.
There may be a conflict, a rebellion and “kicking against the pricks” and, thereby, a liberation of emotional force of the instinct, impressing, on the 295one hand, a stronger organization of the whole process, and, on the other, repressing all conflicting desires. ”

“ Indeed, our reactions to the environment, our moral and social conduct, the affective reactions of our sentiments, instincts, feelings, and other conative tendencies, our “habits,” judgments, points of view, and attitudes of mind—all that we term character and personality—are predetermined by the mental experiences of the past by which they are developed, organized, and conserved in the unconscious. Otherwise all would be chaos. We are thus the offspring of our past and the past is the present. ”

“ Two views of its origin: (a) the intellectual, (b) the emotional—They correspond to two stages in its development—Its innateness and its necessity belong to the motor, not the intellectual order—Genesis of the benevolent feeling. Psychological analysis of its generative elements. Facts in support of this—Discoverers in morality—Genesis of the sense of justice—Phases of its development—Conclusion: complexity of the moral sense—Pathology. Elimination of the questions of criminal anthropology. Moral insensibility. ”

“ If I am not a trained psychologist, I shall not have the proper terms, or shall confuse different terms; and if I am a trained psychologist, I may too probably be misled by my own theories, and I shall certainly find that all the common phrases by which we describe character are too vague and shifting to reflect the vast variety of delicate shades of emotional temperament which we can yet recognise in observation. ”

“ Their complexity is the work of our intellectual nature, which associates and dissociates, mixing and combining perceptions, images, ideas, each of which, in so far as it relates to the individual or social conditions of existence, to the physiological needs, to the offensive and defensive instinct of conservation, to the social, moral, religious, æsthetic, and scientific tendencies, produces in the organism variable effects which, translated into consciousness, impart an affective tone to intellectual states. ”

“ Through our work we have been led to see how great a part is taken in the formation of character by influences, especially those of early childhood, which do not lie on the surface but are embedded in the unconscious strata of the mind. ”

“ Yet when carried to its logical conclusions such thinking inevitably distorts the meaning of personal living, robs our world and our acts of their feeling of reality, serves as an instrument for "regression" or withdrawal of interest from the real tasks and objects of living men and women, and in fact functions for much the same purpose, if not precisely in the same way, as do the ideal systems of the psychopath. ”